2010
Adad Hannah: Masterpieces in Motion
March 21 to May 30, 2010
Creative Conversation: March 21, 2010
This first solo U.S. museum exhibition will feature a selection of the artist’s recent videos created in relation to the canon of historical works of art. Several of the videos were shot on location at the Prado Museum in Madrid and use Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–1504), as well as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), to examine their contemporary settings. The exhibition will also include the artist’s latest work, a reconsideration of Théodore Géricault’s mammoth painting The Raft of the Medusa. Hannah’s work pays homage to the tableau vivant, a popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth century, where live models held a pose for several minutes in order to “stage” a painting. His videos, all tableaux vivants, attempt to freeze moments of interaction with the masterpieces. The tension between the artwork, its display, the mysterious museum viewers, and their almost imperceptible swaying or breathing, is brought into focus by Hannah’s own reframing of the whole situation. The last piece of this intricate mirror game occurs when viewers at The Aldrich become aware that they are unwittingly remaining still while viewing the work.
Image: Adad Hannah, The Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House), 2009
Rackstraw Downes: Under the Westside Highway
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
Rackstraw Downes has been making extraordinary paintings of very ordinary landscapes for more than four decades. His approach to realism is unique in that he rejects the camera as a tool, relying entirely on his own eyes, and the sketches and paintings he produces onsite. Ignoring the picturesque, Downes chooses to depict landscapes at the intersection between the natural environment and the man-made world. His exhibition at The Aldrich will be centered on one work, entitled Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The North River Water Pollution Control Plant. The project will not only feature the final painting, but also include all of the preliminary pencil drawings, subsequent oil sketches, and many months of detailed journal entries that he completed in order to meticulously capture the scene.
Image: Rackstraw Downes, Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street: The Bike Path, No. 1, 2008
Fritz Haeg: Something for Everyone
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
Haeg’s proposal for The Aldrich encompasses a series of projects that will be integrated into the existing landscape and architecture of the Museum. Each project facilitates some sort of activity for humans, animals, and plants. They all explore the possibilities of repurposing places we have inherited in order to provide adequately for everyone, including plants. One project titled Edible Estate includes the planting of a six–foot–wide strip along the entire length of the front sidewalk of the Museum. The plot will be filled with vegetables, herbs, fruits, and grains selected, planted, tended—and then eaten—by The Aldrich’s staff. Another project titled Animal Estates takes place where the Museum’s ash tree recently died. With the assistance of local urban wildlife experts, Haeg will design and provide homes for some of those native animals that lost their habitat. All the projects will be accompanied by instructive materials, so that visitors can create similar estates on their own property.
Image: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estate #4: London, England, 2007
KAWS
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
This first solo museum exhibition of the work of well-known artist and designer KAWS will include his most recent paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as a survey of apparel, product and graphic designs, and limited-edition toys. Originating at the crossroads of art, design, popular culture, and street savvy, KAWS’s output is quite unique. By playing off the different disciplines–namely street art, design, high art–and using each as an element in the other, the artist is revolutionizing the art world and widening the straightforward definitions of “high art.” With wit, irreverence, and even affection, KAWS takes infamous iconic entertainment characters and subversively reinterprets their appearances and personalities. He also creates his own cartoon characters of serpentine physical forms with signature X-ed out eyes. These highly charged characters, recognizable by and accessible to everyone, are cute and humorous artworks that ultimately both serve and criticize contemporary consumer culture.
Image: KAWS, The Long Way Home (detail), 2008
Beryl Korot
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
Beryl Korot is one of the most important innovators in the realm of video art. Korot's videos reflect her interest in how our communication tools mirror the way we present and receive information. As the co-founder in 1970 of Radical Software, the first magazine to explore the notion of alternative communication systems and formats for conveying information—video in particular—it is noteworthy that Korot continues to create fresh work that illuminates the structure of communication at a time when new media is an imperative in a connected world. Korot's early work broke ground on several levels, including the presentation of an early multichannel work, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for systematically weaving a narrative together in a more complex manner, by introducing rhythm and pattern. The Aldrich exhibition will present her latest body of poetically expressive and hypnotic work, as well as the five channel weaving/video work Text and Commentary which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1977.
Image: Beryl Korot, Babel: The 7 minute scroll (detail), 2008
Gary Lichtenstein: 30 Years of Printmaking
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
The Aldrich will mount a survey exhibition of the 35-year career of Connecticut native Gary Lichtenstein, a master printer/painter and fine art publisher. The exhibition will feature prints by Lichtenstein himself, as well as a selection of screenprints that he has produced and/or collaborated on with artists such as Tom Christopher, Robert Cottingham, Alex Katz, Joann Greenbaum, Robert Indiana, Ken Price, Gary Panter, Robert Fried, and Gerard Hemsworth. Lichtenstein apprenticed with Robert Fried in San Francisco in the early 1970s, producing many of the iconic Fillmore posters that defined the Bay area’s rock aesthetic. Lichtenstein had a studio in San Francisco from 1975 to 1999, returning to Connecticut in 2000. The exhibition will also include materials and equipment from Lichtenstein’s studio, such as a semi-automatic silkscreen press, that will reveal the nature of the screen printing process.
Image: Gary Lichtenstein, screen print of Robert Indiana's Hope, 2009
Gina Ruggeri: Immaterial Landscape
June 27 to August 29, 2010
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
Gina Ruggeri’s project for The Aldrich is conceived as a constellation of singular paintings on Mylar, attached flush to the Museum’s walls. The works depict cut-out fragments of mysterious and visionary landscapes that merge seamlessly with the gallery’s surfaces, activating the space. These fragments of nature seem to puncture or erode some walls, while smoke or clouds emerge from others. The large-scale images surround the viewer from floor to ceiling and appear to be three-dimensional, thus testing the boundary between reality and illusion. Ruggeri’s work oscillates between the material and the immaterial; it moves from form to formlessness and ultimately questions the illusionary space not only of the drawings, but of the Museum itself, reminding us that “not everything is what it seems.”
Image: Gina Ruggeri, Double Cavern, 2009
John Shearer: The New Americans
June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011
Exhibition Reception: June 27, 2010
Photographer John Shearer will present his first solo museum exhibition entitled The New Americans. Shearer’Ss project explores immigration from a very personal perspective (his father was an illegal immigrant) that utilizes both his past in the Civil Rights movement as well recent work with immigrant communities in Fairfield and Westchester Counties. Shearer, a highly respected senior figure from the world of American photojournalism, was one of the first African-American photographers to work for a major publication, becoming staff photographer for Look magazinei in 1966 at the age of seventeen.
Image: John Shearer, Stop Sign Man, 1996
Robert Taplin: Main Street Sculpture Project
October 31, 2010 to March 20, 2011
New Haven–based sculptor Robert Taplin has recently focused his attention on a ongoing series of works that portray the historical character Punch and his adventures in the contemporary world. Rooted deep in Western mythology, Punch is an anglicized version of Punchinello, the trickster figure that played a major role in sixteenth–century Italian commedia dell'arte. Taplin's Punch will be six feet tall, while his mother will be eleven feet, creating a narrative tension that expands Punch's subversive role into the modern world. In addition to the outdoor presentation of Punch and His Mother Go Shopping, the Museum will exhibit a selection of the artist’s small Punch studies indoors.
Image: Robert Taplin, The Young Punch and His Mother Go Shopping (detail of clay prototype), 2009
